Balancing autonomy and supervision is an ongoing challenge in medical training. This study explored how residents’ networking with senior physicians influences advice-seeking behaviors and medical errors. Findings suggest that residents made fewer errors when they consulted with fewer senior physicians overall and consulted more frequently with focal senior physicians (i.e., physicians sought out by other residents frequently for consults).

This survey study examined the relationship between medical errors and resident autonomy, consultation with supervising physicians, and knowledge of the medical literature (as perceived by supervising physicians). Researchers found that closer supervision and greater knowledge were associated with lower error rates, suggesting that increasing trainee supervision holds promise in improving patient safety.

This commentary describes a theory-based model to explore factors that influence clinicians' willingness to report medical errors.

The authors look at high reliability, safety culture, and organizational learning as models for safety improvement efforts and discuss the challenges in applying them to health care.

This study discovered that the underlying safety climate may play a role in how various departments use reporting systems. Investigators used a questionnaire to assess how internal medicine, surgery, and intensive care departments perceived existing safety procedures, safety information flow within the department, and the priorities given to safety overall. These findings were analyzed against the errors reported to each hospital's risk management services. The authors discovered that each department shared different safety perceptions and these differences seemed to explain greater versus less willingness to report treatment errors. The same authors previously described the dimensions of safety climate applied to this study.

… discuss the implications for reducing medical errors. … Naveh E; Katz-Navon T; Stern Z. …